The High Price of Creating Free Ads — From an advertiser's perspective, it sounds so easy: invite the public to create commercials for your brand, hold a contest to pick the best one and sit back while average Americans do the creative work. — But look at the videos H. J. Heinz is getting on YouTube.

Last.FM Too Slow: Users Create Their Own Facebook Application — Last.fm is a seriously popular music service (we've dubbed it a viral machine). So users are wondering why they are yet to release a Facebook application - competitors like iLike and MOG are the first and fifth most popular applications, respectively.

Yahoo Experiments With Non-Yahoo Links On Home Page — The major Internet portals like Yahoo, AOL, MSN, Google, etc. do not place links on their home page that go anywhere except deeper into the properties. Advertising is generally the only exception. — So it surprised us …

Images: What 'Star Wars' tech is real? — Droids C-3PO and R2-D2 are not merely movie stars: they've been inducted into the real-life Robot Hall of Fame at Carnegie Mellon University. They're also, for trivia buffs, the only characters to appear in (and survive until the end of) all six Star Wars movies.

iPhone Used to Browse MacRumors.com? — It looks like someone at Apple has started more openly testing the Apple iPhone across web sites, including MacRumors.com. — One reader tipped us off that they had come across iPhone browser identification strings in the Apache logs of their eBay images.

OLPC Seeks Educational Games for XO Laptop — "Game Jam" contest on June 8 will challenge developers to produce fun, educational software for the OLPC. — The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Project is asking software coders to develop free, open-source educational computer games for the XO laptop …

Salesforce.com/Siebel 2.0: Criticism and a Refutation — Some say imitation is the highest form of flattery, but that's only for those who forget that a good rebuttal - or attempted rebuttal - is quite flattering as well. Jason Wood, a fellow Enterprise Irregular and blogger …

MedSignals' digital pill box charts your dosage — As the field of devices that let caregivers step away and give the elderly more independence expands, it was just a matter of time before digital pill boxes hit the mainstream. The aptly-dubbed med-minder holds one's pills in separated compartments …

Make room for new video ad formats — This week marked the one-year anniversary of the launch of click-to-play video ads. To that end, we thought it'd be fitting to introduce three new members of our click-to-play video ads family: the 728x90 Leaderboard, the 120x600 Skyscraper, and the 160x600 Wide Skyscraper.

Winners - 2007 — ESPN.com was the only multiple winner in the 12th Annual EPpy Awards competition when the results were announced today at an awards luncheon that concluded the Interactive Newspaper Conference and Trade Show. The EPpy Awards, which are sponsored by Editor & Publisher …

Japanese government urges Internet regulation change — TOKYO — Seeking to promote Internet distribution of TV content, a government panel has recommended that regs be changed to allow webcasts without first getting permissions from all rights holders. — The panel, the Intellectual …